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  Yet to travel with Cosby is to be struck by several personal characteristics that provide clues to his complexity. One is how extraordinary his memory is. Even in his midseventies, he can summon up granular details from every phase of his life, from the trees on the street where he lived as a toddler to the sound of instruments in the jazz bands he played with in his teens to the home phone numbers of friends he hasn’t seen in years. His prodigious powers of recall explain why he’s been able to spin vivid threads of personal experience into so much comedy and why he can still improvise for two hours straight without losing his train of thought (unless it’s part of the act). But they also suggest that he has equally vivid memories of every personal and professional slight he’s absorbed along the way.

  The second is how hard Cosby works. Not only does he perform somewhere almost every week; he shows up for every concert at least two hours early, so that he can inspect the hall, check production details, and spend ample time meeting with promoters, crew, and backstage well-wishers. Intimates will tell you that he is just following the example of his mother, who toiled twelve-hour days cleaning white people’s homes, and his grandfather, who walked four miles back and forth to a factory job for forty years. But respect for hard work is also a key to Cosby’s much-debated views on racial issues. It’s not that he is oblivious to racism—far from it. It’s just that he believes that playing its victim has never gotten blacks very far, and that ultimately his people always have and always will have to work for any meaningful advances they achieve.

  Although Cosby won’t be making one of his frequent appearances before black youth or black parents on this trip, his passionate and sometimes prickly opinions about race are never far from the surface. Recalling the deprivations of his youth, he uses the term lower economic class but refuses to utter the word poor, because of all the other negative characteristics it suggests (“lacking,” “inferior,” et cetera). Remembering the segregated world of strivers in which he grew up, he worries that black people today have “abandoned the old-time religion that got our grandparents from dirt floors to normal schools.” When he travels to South Carolina tomorrow, he will explain to his promoter why he has returned to the state for the first time since 2005, after supporting an NAACP protest over its refusal to stop flying the Confederate flag over the state capital. “I called the NAACP for an update on the boycott, but they never got back to me,” he says with a shrug, “and I didn’t see that it was doing any good.”

  The third characteristic is how keenly Cosby studies human behavior. It’s been the wellspring of his observational humor, enough to fertilize years of successful sitcoms and decades of fresh stand-up material. But it also means that he can detect a potential con a mile away. In person, he doesn’t appear to be angry or paranoid about it; in fact, there’s an amused glint in his eye when he sees one coming. But he grew up in the projects and served in the navy and has been in show business for fifty years, so he’s never surprised to see people trying to put one over on one another.

  Cosby’s antennae are up even as he lounges backstage before the show in Richmond. After catching a brief nap at the hotel, he’s arrived at the Center Stage concert hall several hours early, as usual. In a spare room down the corridor from his official dressing room, a pizza box and a Starbucks cup sit on the coffee table as he holds a phone to his ear and listens to an agent update him on new concert offers.

  “Take it! Take it! Take it!” he keeps repeating, in the tone of someone listening to an overlong argument for the obvious. Then he says, “Stop questioning, just tell them no! I just played Denver . . . We’ll do it in ’fifteen.” (Except for yearly appearances in Las Vegas and Washington, DC, which keep importing new tourists, he makes a point of waiting at least two years before he returns to most cities, so the locals don’t get tired of him and he can come back with new material.)

  Cosby’s promoter looms in the doorway with last-minute personal requests. A man has dropped off a box from a place called Joey’s Hot Dogs in Richmond, and the security men out back want to know if they should send it in.

  “Is it just the hot dogs or Joey, too?” Cosby asks.

  “I don’t know,” says the promoter.

  “See!” Cosby says, rolling his eyes. “That’s why they shoot the messenger. He comes with incomplete information!”

  The promoter returns several minutes later with the box of hot dogs, but no Joey, and news of another request for a meet and greet. It’s a war veteran in a wheelchair who is a huge fan of Cosby’s and wants to get his autograph.

  “Who’s with him?” he asks.

  “It’s just him,” the promoter says.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Cosby says. “How is he going to get back here by himself in a wheelchair?”

  “He’s with a group from a hospital for wounded vets,” the promoter says, “but they say only he wants to meet you.”

  “I bet!” Cosby says. “Better check that one out.”

  When the promoter reports back that four vets want to come backstage with four caretakers, Cosby says: “That’s more like it, send them in.” But after fifteen minutes, no one has arrived, and it’s time for him to go the official dressing room to receive previously approved guests.

  One is Stu Gardner, the longtime musical collaborator who helped write the famous theme for The Cosby Show. Gardner now lives in Richmond with his wife of forty years, whom Cosby greets as “the high school girl!” Gardner has brought along a white friend named Arthur Lisi, who composed the bridge for The Cosby Show tune, and Lisi’s wife and daughter. But instead of the iconic theme, Cosby wants to reminisce about a mostly forgotten jazz-funk ensemble that Gardner helped him put together in the early seventies called Badfoot Brown and the Bunions Bradford Funeral and Marching Band. He prances around imitating the Bunions’s bassist, Ron Johnson, and soon everyone in the room is weeping with laughter.

  Next L. Douglas Wilder, the former governor of Virginia, arrives with his son. He explains that he first met Cosby after Bill and his wife, Camille, made a $100,000 donation to a state education fund. Then Wilder shares a story about an address that Cosby delivered at William & Mary College in 1993, when former Supreme Court chief justice Warren Burger was the chancellor.

  “Burger was wearing his full regalia,” Wilder says, “and Cos says to him: ‘You’ve got on more jewelry than Amos ’n Andy!’ Can you believe that? To Warren Burger? I almost fell out of my chair!”

  Wilder also brings up about another, more controversial incident involving Cosby and the Supreme Court. “I was there!” he says about the tirade that Cosby unleashed at an event in Washington, DC, in 2004 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. At the time, critics called him an elitist for blasting black Americans who didn’t show respect for education, proper English, or responsible parenting, but Wilder points out that the speech was prescient. “Everything he was talking about is what’s happening now,” he says.

  At five minutes to eight o’clock, a stagehand appears in the dressing room and encourages the guests to take their seats. Cosby begins to make his way to the backstage area, but just then the contingent of veterans in wheelchairs shows up. Introduced to the man who had requested to see him, he learns that the vet suffers from a brain injury. He was shot in the head and has no control over what he is saying, so he talks loudly and randomly even while others are speaking. But Cosby isn’t fazed—he worked with stroke patients and brain damage victims as a physical therapist in the navy—and he patiently chats with the vet and poses for a photograph.

  In the arena outside, a sold-out crowd of more than two thousand people is watching a reel of excerpts from an internet show called OBKB that Cosby produces at his home in Massachusetts and puts up on his website. The clips of him interviewing kids and family members hark back to his Jell-O commercials and guest host gigs on The Tonight Show, but they are also meant to demonstrate that he is up to speed with the digital era.

  Then a black-and-white image of a pale, round-faced man appears on the screen. “Please join in a moment of silence for the memory of Jonathan Winters!” the stage announcer says. The mercurial comedian, who has just died, is one of Cosby’s all-time favorites, a man he compares to the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane for his astonishing powers of improvisation. An interviewer once asked him if he had fifty dollars in his pocket, which comedian would he most want to buy a ticket to see, and Cosby answered without hesitation: “Jonathan Winters!”

  Asked to expand on what the comedian means to him, Cosby cites Winter’s professional words of wisdom. “You get tired of your material before your audience does,” Winters told him when they first met in comedy clubs in the early sixties. Ever since, Cosby has taken that as a warning to keep retiring bits, no matter how famous, before they get stale. (“That’s why ‘Noah’ and ‘The Dentist’ had to go!” he says.) “Some of us have to entertain ourselves while we’re working,” Winters also said. That too resonated with Cosby, who has never liked to rehearse or memorize, on stage or on television. He has always thought he works best when, like a jazz musician, he is riffing on well-developed themes rather than performing note-for-note.

  Now the video intros are over and, without introduction, Cosby strolls onto the stage. The crowd rises, applauding and cheering. He motions for everyone to sit down, and then sits down himself in a chair draped with another of the “Hello, Friend” sweatshirts that he takes wherever he goes, as a greeting and a memorial.

  In his mind, he has a rough outline of the stories he will unspool over the next two hours—where he will begin, how he will build, and how he will end—that still leaves plenty of room for his imagination to roam, depending on his mood and the vibe he feels from the audience. (The outline also ensures that each performance is unique; between the two-hour concert in Richmond tonight and the two in Greenville tomorrow, Cosby will repeat no more than twenty minutes of material.)

  For Doug Wilder’s benefit, he wants the climax of his performance to be a funny story that he has borrowed from the former governor: about a high school date that went awry when Wilder decided to pour a bottle of Canoe cologne in his bathwater before he went to the girl’s house. Leading up to that story, Cosby plans to spend a good half hour charting his introduction to romance, from young boyhood to his late teens.

  First, he will be nine years old, peeking through a stairway banister with his friend Poppy Whitehead to watch Poppy’s older sister French-kiss a boy. Then he will be thirteen, playing spin the bottle at a birthday party and getting to brush lips with his junior high school sweetheart, Doris Mann. Finally, he will be sixteen, taking a stack of Miles Davis albums to the house of a girl named Bernadette Johnson but making the mistake of bathing in Canoe first. It will be a long, vivid reenactment that ends with Bernadette’s father brandishing a gun to make Cosby go away. Then, in the punch line, the father sees him years later at Bernadette’s wedding to another man. “I had nothing against you,” the father explains, “but I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with that smell in the house!”

  As Cosby eases into his routine, a voice can be heard at the rear of the concert hall. It’s far up in the balcony, and it sounds like someone arguing with an usher or blurting out commentary about the show. Not everyone in the audience notices, but it’s loud enough that more than a few heads turn to see what’s going on.

  Even though Cosby can’t see more than a few of yards into the audience, his keen ears immediately recognize the source of the commotion in the balcony. It’s the brain-damaged veteran in the wheelchair he has just met backstage. Now he understands why the encounter was arranged: the vet knew that he might talk uncontrollably during the show, and he wanted Cosby to be prepared. He also registers why no one is trying to silence the vet, because he can’t help his outbursts. So even as Cosby continues to perform, offering no hint that anything is wrong, he is calculating how he will deal with that eternal bane of stand-up comics: the distractions from the audience or the room that can disrupt even the best of routines.

  Cosby calls them “concentration thieves”—and it’s not just the comic’s focus but also the audience’s attention that they can steal. He starts thinking about how he will vary his rhythm—how he will slow down in places and speed up in others—to keep the audience from being distracted. He also begins making snap alterations to the outline in his head.

  When Cosby talks about his material, he divides it into two categories: “gourmet meals” and “fast food.” The gourmet meals are the long stories he loves to tell, the ones that conjure a vivid setting and a world of characters that “put the audience there.” They don’t always deliver a laugh a minute, but they leave the audience with a deep sense of satisfaction. The fast food is made up of the more obvious jokes and physical bits that are good for a quick laugh but don’t linger in the memory.

  Cosby’s cologne story and his other tales of romantic misadventures are a classic gourmet meal. But to make sure that he keeps the audience laughing despite the distracting vet, he decides to add a few extra helpings of fast food. At one point, he veers off into a trusty Northerners versus Southerners joke about the difference between a “beating” and a “whooping.” (“In a whooping, the parents give you a knife . . .”—he doesn’t have to finish the sentence, and the crowd is laughing—“to cut the switch.”) During his romantic reverie, he throws in a gag about asking his father what platonic means. “It means you won’t get any!” his father says.

  The stratagems work. As Cosby nears the end of the show, no one is paying attention to the noise in the back anymore, and he is able to serve up one last long story. He is in high school, and his Granddad Samuel, a religious man, tells him that he shouldn’t play with a friend named Rookie Jackson because Jackson was “born out of wedlock.” When Cosby asks his mother what that phrase means, she mistakenly assumes that her son has gotten a girl pregnant. He is sent to his room as his parents carry on an agitated conversation in the kitchen. Then his father comes to tell him that they’ve decided that “you’ll bring the baby here.” The conversation that ensues is funny and touching and, Cosby admits later, imagines the kind of rapport he might have had with his real father if the man hadn’t been such an unreliable drunk.

  The “out of wedlock” story goes over well, but Cosby wants to leave the crowd laughing a little harder. So as he slips on the sandals he took off at the start of the concert, he tells a slightly naughty story about a funny moment that he and his wife, Camille, shared at the very beginning of their fifty-year marriage. They had been wed for only four weeks and were still in the throes of young passion. Camille had taken a particularly long time preparing for bed one night, and when she emerged from the bathroom, she glanced at the sheets and witnessed the evidence of her husband’s excitement.

  Camille got down on her hands and knees and started looking under the bed.

  “What’s under there?” Cosby asked.

  “I think there’s a dog in this room!” Camille said, and they both roared with laughter.

  And so does the audience in Richmond.

  Missioned accomplished—having left his fans happy and shown again why younger comedians such as Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock and Louis C.K. worship Bill Cosby in the same way that he reveres Jonathan Winters—he rises to his feet. He scoops up the second “Hello, Friend” sweatshirt draped over the back of his chair and waves to the audience as they give him another standing ovation. Then he walks offstage as the house lights come up and satisfied reviews reverberate through the hall:

  “He’s so great!”

  “I just love him!”

  “I can’t wait to tell my parents!”

  As the crowd files toward the exits, the air fills with a jaunty whistle and a rhythmic clacking sound. It’s “Sweet Georgia Brown,” the tune that has ended Bill Cosby concerts for decades. There’s a funny tale behind that, too, and it’s as good a place as any to begin his story.

  PART ONE

  1

  GRANDDAD SAMUEL’S BIBLE

  The basketball game took place, as they always did in those days, on the black side of town. Sometimes it would be at a Negro high school. Sometimes it would be at a black boxing gym, or even between makeshift hoops erected in a Colored ballroom. On Saturday nights, there would be a dance afterward. Black folks would come from all over the host city and pay a quarter to watch their local men square off for four eight-minute quarters against a squad from out of town, and afterward they would stay to jitterbug until the wee hours. It was 1954, so there were never any white faces in the crowd.

  The setting that night was Wilmington, Delaware, and the visiting team was called the Mount Airy Badgers. Or “The Philadelphia Mount Airy Badgers” as the poster outside billed them—“All the way from Philadelphia!” Their coach was a man named Berry, or Mr. Berry, as the players addressed him. He would pack all six men in his squad into his car and drive them to out-of-town games. He even paid them a few dollars, although sometimes he bought them hamburgers and milkshakes instead or made them bid for the chance to sit in the front seat, next to the heater.

  The men who played for the Badgers were mostly college and former college players, some of them with wives and children already. But that day, there were two high school students in Mr. Berry’s car, a fourteen-year-old named Herb Adderley and a sixteen-year-old named Bill Cosby. They went to school together, at Germantown High, but neither of them was allowed to play on the varsity basketball team. In Adderley’s case, it was because he was only a sophomore, and the school coach, Mr. Webb, had a rule against sophomores playing on the varsity squad. In Cosby’s case, it was because Mr. Webb also had a rule that you couldn’t play varsity if your grades weren’t good enough. And Cosby was a terrible student. In fact, he had transferred to Germantown that year after being held back in the tenth grade at Central High School—twice.